


space and time between

by preromantics



Category: Generation Kill
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-30
Updated: 2010-12-30
Packaged: 2017-10-14 06:12:18
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,952
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/146231
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/preromantics/pseuds/preromantics
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Some things have to be broken before they can be fixed. <i>Nate is at Brad’s doorstep before he really has time to think things through, the airport a blur of lines and security and too much to drink on the plane.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	space and time between

**Author's Note:**

> For mydocuments in the yagkyas exchange. Her prompt was this: _Come back babybird / With your dirty wings in tatters / Come home where you belong / Nobody knows you better / Now bring back your velvet heart, and we'll make you brand new feathers_

Nate is at Brad’s doorstep before he really has time to think things through, the airport a blur of lines and security and too much to drink on the plane.

“You’re drunk,” Brad says when he opens the door, 17:00 pacific time, shirtless and just in board shorts, all still tanned skin from service that Nate wants to touch and taste and --

Nate doesn’t get drunk, and he doesn’t take flights across the country just to show up on the doorstep of someone he hasn’t seen in a year and a half, he doesn’t --

“God, Fick,” Brad says, standing still in the doorway, and everything Nate expects to hear in his tone is completely absent -- it’s closer to resentment, to things Nate doesn’t want to think about. Brad steps back from the door after a moment.

“Get inside,” he says.

It’s raining out, cool rain that soaked Nate through in the short walk from the airport taxi to Brad’s apartment on the third floor of his complex. The door looks exactly the same as Nate remembers from almost two years ago -- when he squints he can make out the scrapes around the doorknob where Brad had dragged his keys, blinding searching for the lock while Nate distracted him with his tongue and hands, pressed against the faded paint of the door.

“Grab a shirt,” Brad says, when Nate walks in, sobering up quickly and taking the walk down the short hallway to Brad’s bedroom without thinking, nearly with his eyes closed.

Brad has beers out on the table by the couch when Nate comes back, and they drink but don’t talk.

“You’re leaving in the morning,” Brad says, and Nate hasn’t looked at him all night, hasn’t  _really_  looked at him, but he does now, staring at the way Brad is laying back against the couch, eyes closed. His face is more lined, the set of his mouth hard and tired, his fingers curled tight around the neck of his beer, almost defensively.

Nate doesn’t say he’s not leaving, though he knows he’s not.

When it gets late he spreads out on the couch, Brad down the hall in his room, and Nate closes his eyes and thinks about how, even after a year and a half, he could still make the walk to Brad’s bedroom with his eyes shut. He knows the exact amount of steps it would take from the couch, had to learn in the months before when he and Brad were too busy paying attention to skin and touch and taste to pay attention to how they would get from the couch to the bed.

-

Nate shifts awake around three, the air in the living room cooler than it should be, and it only takes a second for him to realise the sliding glass doors to Brad’s tiny balcony are open. He stands from the couch, the tile on Brad’s living room floor too-cold on his feet, but he steps forward to look out the doors anyway.

Brad is standing out there, shoulders uncharacteristically bowed down, his profile lit gently by the orange light fixed against the side of the wall.

Nate watches him for a moment, the long line of his back and the stretch of still-tanned skin spread endlessly over the indents of his spine, the raises of his shoulders. He flexes his fingers against his own side, curling them into the worn cotton of the shirt he’d grabbed from Brad’s room earlier, a standard issue multi-blend cotton from recon training, Brad’s numbers faded and worn into the material over Nate’s chest.

(“Just take one,” Brad had said earlier, leaning against the door frame to his bedroom right after Nate had walked into his apartment, and Nate felt momentarily awkward for getting caught staring down into Brad’s meticulously folded drawer of shirts indecisively. 

Nate grabbed the most worn one in the back, under a dress shirt with it’s collar still tucked over a ridged cardboard insert, and raised an eyebrow at Brad in the doorway.

“Only you, Fick,” Brad had said, with no explanation, turning away from the door and back out into the hall.

Nate slipped the shirt over his head, felt it hang in slight loose folds between his shoulder blades, soft on his skin, and let out a breath, turning to follow.)

Nate watches for longer than he means too, twisting wrinkles into the loose shirt, wondering what it would feel like to run the pads of his fingers down the skin on Brad’s back, over his ink, if he’d feel the grit and dirt of desert sand dug into the skin tight over Brad’s spine.

“Brad,” he calls, voice still rough with sleep, and Brad doesn’t turn towards the room, just straightens up, looking out over the distant water.

“Brad,” Nate says, again, this time walking forward, out into the splash of yellowed light until he gets to the railing, standing close enough that his shoulder brushes against Brad’s bare arm.

Brad doesn’t say anything. There are empty beer bottles gathered around his feet, the light caught in the amber of the glass. Nate imagines Brad spending nights out on his balcony, drinking alone, and is struck with the desire to kick them all off the balcony, just to hear the sound they’d make shattering three stories below on the concrete of the sidewalk. To see if Brad would react.

Brad is different -- the lines of his face are different, though Nate can’t figure out how, the way he holds himself, even the way he had sat next to Nate on the couch, their conversation silted and mostly silent, completely going around the reason Nate had come -- why he should even need a reason at all, though it had been so long.

“When I first got back,” Nate says after a while, steady and still low, staring out at the water along with Brad, “I stayed at my parent’s house before the fall semester. I didn’t sleep. I’d sit on the back deck and close my eyes and listen to the highway a few blocks away and morph the sound into distant fire, and think about --”

“Don’t,” Brad says, sudden, cold. “Don’t do that, don’t pretend --”

Nate turns to him, looking not at his face but at his hands curled around the railing. “I didn’t come here just for your sake,” he says, although it’s not entirely what he wanted to say at all.

Brad moves, drawing Nate’s eyes up to his face, to the tight set of his mouth. “I know why you came,” Brad says.

Nate goes to shake his head --  _he_  doesn’t even know why he came, not really, only that he knew he had to, that --

“You came because everyone said, oh, who can fix Brad? Who can fix the Iceman? Nate can. And they said, oh, LT, go fix Brad because he’s fucking broken, and won’t return Ray’s nonsense idiotic fucking backwards phonecalls and he won’t come to the fucking family picnics -- because that’s exactly what he wants to do with his leave -- ”

“Brad,” Nate says, urgent all at once, reaching out with a hand to do something, touch, pull something, even as Brad knocks him back, leaning close and in his face.

“Because they figured we’d kept up all this time, that we had long chats about the fucking meaning of life, they figured you already knew because Nate fucking Fick can always fix Brad,” he says, eyes narrowed, “because he’s someone I care about in a special fucking extraordinary way, except they didn’t know that you hadn’t called in almost two, never came to see me on leave, never --”

Nate punches him, and Brad staggers back with it, caught off guard. “Fuck,” Nate says, because it’s the easiest thing to say. “What the  _fuck_ , Brad, that’s --”  _Not his fault, fucking mutual, messed up, what the_  fuck.

“Go,” Brad says, eerily calm, though Nate has already braced himself for a punch back.

“No,” Nate says, steady, staring right at Brad.

Brad steps forward, closer and closer until Nate has to step back to keep his balance, stepping until he reaches the wall,

“I didn’t even know you were  _back_ , Brad,” Nate says, quiet and urgent again. “I had to hear from Wynn, and only because he was talking to someone  _else_  about you not being around now that you were home and I thought I misunderstood.”

Brad snorts, a quick exhale of breath through his nose that Nate can feel against his cheek.

“Then I had Ray, and then everyone calling me, even though I hadn’t been around for them in years, not since you -- and all I could do was think about you halfway across the country, and --”

“You decided to come pay me a nice friendly visit?” Brad asks, raising an eyebrow.

“You can’t say -- you can’t blame  _me_  for the last year.” Nate closes his eyes. “You promised,” he says, quieter, just barely an exhale of breath.

“So did you, once,” Brad returns after a pause, an edge to his voice that’s equally as hard sounding as it is tired.

Nate doesn’t open his eyes to see what Brad looks like, even though his body strains forward, everything he’d put to the side for the past 18 months itching over his skin all at once. He never promised anything.

(Nate remembers running on the beach before dawn, opting to go barefoot with Brad because regular shoes felt strange, too light on his feet after they first got back, the sand getting stuck in his toes and drying against his skin in thick clumps, gritty and pebbly, so unlike the fine dust he thought would never cease to be a permanent layer over his skin.

He remembers watching the beach sand run down the drain under his feet after, the water running in hot, welcome streams down his legs, tangled up with Brad’s in the shower, Brad’s mouth even hotter than the water at the back of his neck, lips and teeth dragging down his spine until Nate had to rest his head against the tile on the shower wall, biting down into the skin on his forearm.

Fuck -- everything had almost been  _simple_. Two months, and they each had meetings and Nate had paperwork and a panel and more paperwork and -- in-between it all they had each other, hands and mouths and lips and Nate laid out on the bed, Brad’s dick in his mouth, his tongue relentless between Nate’s thighs while Nate’s fingers curled around the iron bars of Brad’s headboard, his back arched up at an impossible angle.

They’d had mornings on the beach, running down to the pier and Nate learning what it meant for Brad to ride his bike in crisp late night air for miles until they hit familiar-unfamiliar desert, Nate’s arms loosely draped over Brad’s waist, his chin hooked over Brad’s shoulder all the way to Vegas and back.

They’d had afternoons over food and too much cheap beer and nights where they didn’t even make it to the bedroom, Nate bent over the counter or rolling off the couch and onto the tile floor in Brad’s living room, the feeling of the tiles pressed into Nate’s shoulder blades making it easy to pretend the cold was making him shiver in contrast to the heat where Brad was pressed into him him, fucking deep and relentless, instead of the look on Brad’s face, the seconds of overwhelming openness when Nate could barely stand to look straight at him.

Except, Nate had to leave, had to start everything over across the country and Brad had to go back, had to make Nate’s chest seize up whenever his eyes glazed over long passages in his philosophy textbooks and thought about Brad in the thick of everything, one moment away from never --

And they tried emailing, tried phonecalls, and Brad had to be more tired than Nate felt -- finals and papers and civilian, normal, half-assed things that were no where near what Brad was enduring, but Brad never let Nate hear anything but the ease of doing what he was built to do in his voice, oceans away.

“In a year, two,” Brad had said, after months and one week where Nate had finally been able to taste him again, to wake up overheated and tangled and without anxious dreams haunting his mornings, “we can -- fuck, Nate, I don’t know. In a year or two, maybe, something.”

Except Nate had taken it as a promise he knew Brad couldn’t keep. That when Brad was back, when he read ready they would -- whatever came next. They stopped talking, stopped anything, and Nate closed his eyes every night and thought about too many things, about everything, waiting.

Nate had said he’d wait, too, words pressed into the inside of Brad’s thigh, the skin stretched tight around thick muscle, and Nate knew Brad pretended not to hear, but that night -- the last night -- Brad had fucked him from behind, slow, pulling all the way out with each thrust before pressing back in, Nate’s thighs and arms shaking with the strain of holding himself up, the cotton of his pillowcase twisted between his teeth against everything he wanted to say but couldn’t.)

“You didn’t tell me you came back,” Nate says, after a long stretch of silence, the only sound between them Nate’s breathing and the distant swell and crash of waves on the beach. He opens his eyes slowly, blinking to focus up at Brad’s face, half in shadow and half splashed with yellow light. “What was I supposed to do?”

For a moment, Brad face relaxes, eyes almost searching. “Didn’t think I’d have to,” he says, after a moment, and just as Nate starts to lean up, Brad steps back and turns, walking back through the open sliding glass doors and away, leaving Nate pressed back against the wall, skin hot.

-

Nate wakes up on the couch to the sound of Brad’s front door closing, and he shakes the sleep from his body, tying his sneakers where he’d left them by the front door before heading out to catch up with Brad.

The sky is streaked pink and orange, the light changing from dusky blue to gold as Nate runs down the paved walkway towards the beach, straining to breathe in enough of the morning air to wake himself fully, pressing forward to catch up with Brad.

He plans things to say, half-words in his brain,  _how long have you been home, what have you been doing for a year, did you ever think about -- me, us, everything, fuck_ , but when he catches up to Brad out on the beach he doesn’t say anything, just matches Brad’s pace along the sand, ignoring the tightness of every breath in his chest.

They run for longer than Nate remembers, a mile or more past the pier before Brad finally doubles back, the silence between them wider and wider with each inhale Nate has to remember to take, his endurance much less than it used to be.

Brad only speaks when they stop, heading up the beach towards the pavement at a light jog. “Not bad,” he says, facing forward and not looking at Nate, though Nate still catches the upwards curl of his mouth. “Here I figured you’d gone softer than a freshly shaved sorority pussy on me after all this time.”

“Colorful,” Nate comments, even though it’s not even Brad at his fullest, even though every edge of Brad that Nate always knew feels a little too distant, now, and Nate is unsurprised to find other words caught up somewhere in his throat.

Brad laughs, low and quick, slowing nearly down to a brisk walk, a pace which Nate is more than thankful to match.

“I’m not leaving,” Nate says as they round the corner to Brad’s apartment.

The sun flickers off cars that pass by, nearly halfway up in the sky now, a wide expanse of blue replacing the streaks of sunrise that had accompanied their morning run, so Nate barely catches Brad’s expression through his own squinting.

“I’m not cooking breakfast for you,” Brad says after a beat, taking the steps up to his floor two at a time, distracting Nate with the easy stretch of his legs, toned and fluid as ever.

Nate hums, low, remembers cooking eggs and bacon for them both for days straight, nearly burning everything each time Brad came into the kitchen peeling off his shirt, the skin on his chest still slick with sweat from an early morning run, the edges of his hipbones standing out as he stretched languidly by the counter. Brad’s every movement made Nate want to forget about eating entirely just to close the distance between them, press Brad back into the counter until the edge left a mark Nate could lick across later.

Instead of eggs and bacon now, Nate shakes out cereal from a box on top of the fridge into two bowls after Brad leaves him at the door to go and change, setting the bowls on two opposite ends of the counter. Nate is still in Brad’s shirt, sticking to his back with sweat, but he doesn’t feel like changing.

They don’t say anything when Brad comes back in, sitting across from Nate and starting in on Nate’s pro-offered breakfast silently.

“We should talk,” Nate says, after a while, trying for conversational and instead bypassing anything near a light tone. He feels tired when he says it. He didn’t fly out to talk -- he doesn’t know what he came out to do, only that it had finally sunk in that Brad was  _back_ , and that Nate knew where he was, and that Brad wasn’t himself even by the reasonably low standards of the rest of their fucked version of a family circuit.

He’d just left, unpacked and unprepared, wanting all the way down through his bones things that he hadn’t let himself want or think about for more than a year and -- well, he’d ended up here.

Brad doesn’t answer; he stands and sets his bowl in the sink, pouring the last of his milk and cereal down the drain. “I wrote you letters,” Brad says, not turning away from the sink, turning on the water to rinse his bowl.

Nate turns away from his cereal, twisting on his stool to study Brad’s back, the way he’s bent comfortably over the sink, the flex of his upper arms as he takes a sponge to the inside of his bowl. “I never --” Nate starts,  _knew, never got them, I wrote you so many times, hovered over your name on your phone until the battery died, I --”_.

“I never sent them,” Brad says, cutting him off before Nate can figure out what to say. “I wrote because it took up time when everyone was fucked, lying in graves or going over completely shit-headed policy and strategy.”

Nate takes a spoonful just to do something with his mouth, the crunch of the cereal too loud in the little kitchenette.

Brad starts in on other dishes in the sink, Nate’s angle just affording him a view of Brad’s hands, enough that he can watch the skin turn pinkish under the heat of the water, soap suds sliding in rivulets down Brad’s wrists. “I wrote about you,” Brad continues, not even talking to Nate anymore, just talking, detached, “what I wanted to do to you, what I missed about you. Most of it I didn’t even write down, I just distracted myself with thinking about it because it was all so -- so fucking easy, us, together. Except I couldn’t pretend I could just come back every time after months of being away to have you waiting here, to feel fucking  _guilty_  every time I went back overseas to do what I  _wanted_  to be doing, just because you weren’t there and I might never -- and I couldn’t stop thinking about you, about how nothing should have felt as easy as it did, when we came back the first time.”

Nate pushes his bowl away, staring intently at the line of Brad’s jaw, not moving on his stool.

Brad turns the water off, turning to dry the dishes on the counter, methodical.

“Fuck,” Nate says, a quiet rush, processing. “Brad.”

At that, Brad turns, dishtowel in his hand entirely forgotten when Nate steps away from the stool, two, three, five steps to Brad against the counter, the dishtowel dropped to the floor as soon as Nate curls a hand around Brad’s upper arm, pulling him forward until their foreheads meet.

“You’re --” Nate starts, quiet and low, digging his fingers into Brad’s arm and splaying the fingers of his other hand along Brad’s hip, right against the hem of his fresh shirt.

Brad makes a low, guttural noise deep in his throat before reacting, one hand coming up to the back of Nate’s head, gripping and pressing forward, a year’s worth of Nate’s uncut hair tangling between his fingers.

Their mouths meet, open, sharing one breath before Brad pushes forward, Nate stumbling backwards at with the force of it, of  _Brad,_  his other hand on the small of Nate’s back, pressing them together hard and sharp, Brad’s mouth all teeth and slick tongue until Nate hits the counter behind them.

“You’re fucking stupid, Nate,” Brad says between them, voice gritty and dangerously low, his teeth dragging down Nate’s jaw, lips following.

“You’re --” Nate tries, again, cutting himself off with a low groan as Brad works a leg between Nate’s own. Brad pulls back for a moment, and Nate looks at him, unfocused. “Missed you,” Nate says, surging forward and gripping Brad’s shirt with both his fists, both of them pulling and pushing at the same time, managing to get both of their shirts up and over their heads while still staying together, Nate licking deep into Brad’s mouth, warm heat and skin and everything Nate remembers and thought, for a while, he might have forgotten.

Nate scratches at Brad’s back, can’t help it, both of them moving blindly from the kitchen to the hall, intermittently pressing each other up against the wall and stopping their movement towards Brad’s bedroom entirely, pressing fingertip-shaped bruises into each other’s skin in places that ache all over Nate in an old, familiar way.

Nate doesn’t even pause when the back of his thighs hit the edge of the bed, just lets Brad press him back and down into the mattress, crawling up over him, kicking his shorts down off his ankles as he moves, Nate’s own somewhere in the middle of the hallway.

He’s hard against his stomach, and Brad’s hand is rougher than it needs to be when he wraps his fingers around, jerking him off in the way Nate could never replicate with his own hands, all the times he tried not to think about Brad and utterly failed.

It’s not just what Nate wants though -- he wants everything, wants all of Brad, so much that he feels like he’s going to crawl out of his own skin, flushed hot with the morning sun and with their run, muscles already tired and sore, aching hot where Brad’s fingertips have already started to drag bruises and marks, the slow throbs of light pain from the bite marks against his collarbone left in the hallway skirts down Nate’s spine, pools heat low in his stomach.

Nate pushes up and rolls them over quickly, shaking off Brad’s hand and settling himself over Brad’s hips, his own shoulders caving forward when he reaches to wrap his fingers around both of their dicks, Brad’s slick with precome at the tip, enough to make them slide together under Nate’s fingers easily. Nate rolls his hips forward with each pass of his hand, Brad reaching around to his ass, fingers digging in and urging his hips forward, Nate’s name coming out low from Brad’s throat, everything Nate has wanted to hear for a year, more than a year, spending so much time  _wanting_  that he forgot what it was like to actually  _have_. To have Brad’s hands on him, their skin together, hot and slick with sweat and salty under Nate’s tongue.

One of Brad’s hands on his ass moves in, one finger slick with the sweat between them and with something more, maybe caught in Brad’s mouth while Nate was distracted, moving to press just lightly against the rim of Nate’s hole, pressing down with just the barest hint of pressure, slick, but enough to make Nate jerk into his hand and against Brad’s dick and come, just at the memory of Brad’s fingers twisted deep and wet inside him.

He rolls to the side, just a little, his own come slicking the movement his fist around Brad’s dick, nearly too-wet friction under his fingers, but Brad tilts his hips up and meets the motion of Nate’s hand, coming on an upstroke, the pad of Nate’s thumb swiping over the head of his dick.

Brad groans, low, reaching out so Nate can roll against his side, breathing out against his neck.

They lay like that, not speaking, for several minutes, come drying cool against Nate’s stomach, light filtering bright through the lines in Brad’s blinds. Brad reaches around to Nate’s thigh, massaging warm circles there, sparking spots of heat under Nate’s skin.

“You’re right,” Nate says after a while, beginning to move his mouth warm and slow against the dip of Brad’s collarbone, “it shouldn’t be like this.”

Brad’s hand stills against his thigh, his fingers curling and pressing down into the skin there.

“This easy,” Nate amends, continuing, dragging his lips down and shifting on the bed to increase his range of motion, dipping his head down. “Except it is.”

Brad makes a noise -- agreement or something low, warning, maybe just at the way Nate is licking softly at his skin, trailing his tongue down to his nipple.

“This time though,” Nate says, hovering over Brad’s nipple, darting his tongue out to lick around it for a second, “we’re not going to fuck it up.”

“You hold too much faith in me,” Brad says, soft, groaning when Nate leans down to suck, Brad’s nipple pebbling between his lips and lightly grazing teeth.

Nate leans up, though, looking right at him. “I do. Rightfully,” he says. Brad looks back at him through heavy eyelids, a little furrow between his eyes.

“No promises,” Brad says after a moment, shifting to sit up against the headboard. Nate follows him up, rolling to straddle Brad’s thigh.

“Don’t need them,” Nate says. He leans in, taking Brad’s bottom lip between his own and rolling until Brad’s mouth opens enough to let him in, kissing deep and languidly before he pulls back, looking down at Brad’s expression, considering. “I’m not going to let you -- us -- not this time --”

“That,” Brad says, cutting him off and shaking his head slightly, “sounds like a promise, Fick.”

Nate swallows, once, leaning back up with the intent of sliding down to the spread of Brad’s open thighs. “Maybe it is,” he says.

Brad drags him back down by his neck before he can move. “It better be,” he says, low and forceful in a way that races down Nate’s spine.

Nate grins quick at that, Brad pressing forward to roll them both over in a familiar gesture that Nate groans at, already anticipating it when Brad leans down on his wrists, guiding them up above his head and settling low on Nate’s hips, pinning them down. “Are you giving me orders?” Nate asks, looking up at the intent in Brad’s expression with heat pooling low across his skin, deep inside again.

“Never, LT,” Brad says, grinning wide now, eyes bright as his hips roll down.

“Fucker,” Nate breathes out, when Brad shifts, half-hard against Nate’s thigh again already.

Brad hums low in his throat, rolling his hips down in low circles that Nate meets with more force than necessary, groaning when Brad leans down and licks a line up his neck, breathing hot against his ear. “Missed you, too,” Brad says, gritty and low, even though Nate doesn’t need to hear it, already knows, “this and you.”

“Yeah,” Nate says, though he means to say something more meaningful, catching Brad’s eyes and straining up with wanting to pull him all the way down to meet Nate’s lips, flexing his fingers against the rungs of the headboard where Brad has his wrists pressed down. He settles for spreading his legs wider under Brad’s hips, curling his fingers tight when Brad releases his wrists, not even asking Nate to keep his hands where they are, even after all this time, knowing.

-

Nate remembers the months before, ages ago now, discovering what they couldn’t out in theater, skin and hands and heat and the way it all felt different than anything Nate had felt before, overwhelming and intimidating in a way unique to Brad in most areas.

Now, though, it’s -- it’s not all new, the press of Brad’s tongue inside of him, slipping between two curled fingers, it’s familiar but better, the thought of tomorrow not as daunting as it always had been. The thought of forever still daunting, maybe, but warm in Nate’s chest, like something that could happen rather than something he felt guilty thinking about.

Later, when they wake up to afternoon light spilling through the blinds and heating Nate’s skin in patches, Nate doesn’t even think about the year and a half of space between them, he just focuses on the bit of skin he can reach with his lips, Brad’s bare shoulder under his mouth, hot and warm.

  
  
  



End file.
